[chuwy]

For me most important benefit is running without pre-installed VM. Not particularly important for backend, but huge win for user-space tools.

[pjmlp]

You could always bundle the jre, and with Java 9 one can even make use of the newly introduced linker to create a customized image just with the relevant classes.

[djsumdog]

True, and if you wouldn't have to worry about Oracle licensing either (although you can avoid that currently with OpenJDK as well)